15 May Episode 11 – Stories of Race & Power

In this episode Annenberg doctoral student Florence Madenga interviews scholar, activist and media producer Chenjerai Kumanyika. Their conversation touches on the ethics of media production and research on and by people of color. They also discuss the challenges and opportunities for addressing forms of oppression in the contemporary political moment.

TRANSCRIPT

Aaron Shapiro: Welcome to Media at Risk, a podcast from the Center for Media at Risk at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. In today’s episode Annenberg doctoral student Florence Madenga interviews scholar, activist and media producer Chenjerai Kumanyika. Their conversation touches on the ethics of media production and research on and by people of color and the challenges and opportunities for addressing forms of oppression in the contemporary political moment. Hope you enjoy.

Florence
Madenga: Hi,
my name is Florence Madenga I am a PhD students at the Annenberg School for Communication.
In this episode I sat town with Chenjerai Kumanyika, who is a journalist,
activist and Assistant Professor at the Rutgers University Department of
Journalism and Media studies.

Chenjerai
Kumanyika: I
teach a variety of topics at the intersection of social justice and popular
culture. A lot of my stuff focuses on race, journalism and race in music
industries and how race is happening in media making and social movements; all
those kinds of things.

Florence Madenga: He is also the co-executive producer and co-host of the Peabody Award-winning podcast, “Uncivil.” I spoke to Chenjerai about navigating his various roles, being a scholar of color in the Trump era and tackling deep-seeded issues like white supremacy, the Civil War and black philanthropy.

Florence
Madenga:
You’re at the intersection of a lot of things— what are the advantages and drawbacks
of being in that space?

Chenjerai
Kumanyika: Let
me make sure I understand your question.You’re asking me what are the drawbacks of working in these different
fields, right? The intersection of these fields?

Florence
Madenga: Yeah,
especially because the expectations of working in certain fields sort of
contradict others. So, working in academia is very different from working in
media, which is also very different from working in activism. And sometimes
some people have views that you can’t be both; that you can’t be a journalist
and an activist. So I’m just wondering how you maneuver those things.

Chenjerai
Kumanyika: Right.I think there’re two things I would
point out, two sort of areas of tension.One is what counts as certain
kinds of knowledge. Journalists generally don’t have too much of a problem
dealing with academic knowledge other than many scholars are horrible … we’re horrible talkers. I mean we traffic in a
whole lot of nuance, which is good, but then we nuance things to the point
where it’s unintelligible to people. But I think that in the reverse it’s
interesting. I mean, right now what you’re seeing is all kinds of knowledge
production being made possible. Some things were already possible before but
they just kind of take on a new feeling in the context of new media.

Andthe academy
now is really thinking “How can we account for different kinds of
knowledge production.” Like, what do we make of a podcast? What do we make of
someone who’s extremely prolific on social media to the point where they’re
really influencing things in that regard. I mean, certainly someone’s social
media or even a podcast is not the same as a book. It’s not the same as a peer
reviewed journal article and that kind of research. And I feel really strongly
that we shouldn’t try to equate those things.

But I also think that there’s room for different kinds of
knowledge production and I think that is a challenge for scholars who are
trying to do both research that engages with political organizing and
grassroots organizing and scholars who are doing something like what I’m doing
where you’re in podcasts and those forms of narrative journalism. I think at
this point you just kind of have to do it all.

And then I think there’s all the slow work of making illustrating
the rigor. I mean, when we make “Uncivil” so much research goes into it. We’re
traveling. We got interviews that nobody got. We have to transcribe those
interviews. We got to put those into a narrative… we’re really thinking about
the structure, which means you have to think about how history happens. You feel
me?

Florence Madenga: Yes

Chenjerai Kumanyika: Then you got to make a case to people that that’s rigorous
knowledge.

Florence
Madenga: Yes,
absolutely. Some other things you’re doing are these amazing podcasts. So a lot of them are on the topic
of race and systematic issues, right?

Chenjerai Kumanyika: Yes.

Florence Madenga: “Uncivil” is around history of the Confederacy and its legacy.And then you were sort of involved in “Seeing White” as well. These issues are… definitely really, really deep and difficult to deal with. And journalism… even school systems, usually don’t really deal with those issues well. Which is why we end up with a lot of problems. I’m wondering what your thoughts are, how are you thinking about getting around these issues in journalism and as an educator. How are you getting around those shortfalls that these spaces usually have?

Chenjerai Kumanyika: Well, I can say the community of journalists that I work with really are passionate about trying to understand systems and trying to use narrative journalism, whether it’s a podcast or a written essay, to reclaim storytelling to tell stories about power. I recently did a talk for a conference called Third Coast, which is a great conference of storytellers and people who make radio and podcasts. I did it with Sandhya Dirks. It’s called All Stories Are About Power. That every story has political elements, is saying something about the structure, saying something about the culture, and of course, the power of stories is that they can have individual compelling narratives.

So I think that when we want to understand things like
race, we want to understand things like the criminal justice system, we can use
individual stories to do that work. The problem is that individual stories can
also be very depoliticizing. So there’s a dominant mode that has to do with the
history of social thought and how that intersects with industry and a lot of
other things. Particularly in the West, our dominant mode of understanding
everything is more psychological than sociological. Everything comes down to
the individual. So what that means for understanding something like race or
misogyny is that people just are like, “Am I a misogynist? Do I hate
women? No, I don’t. Okay, no problem.” Like there’s no patriarchy, there’s
no ability to capture a larger structure. It’s just l, “Am I racist?
No.” You know? Like the bar for being a racist is you literally have to
have a hood on, which turns out a lot of people do-right–the entire government
apparently of Virginia had hoods on.

But I think that patriarchy’s a much broader system than
just the attitudes. So the trick is to tell stories and use someone’s personal
experience in a way that illustrates that, right? I think a wealth of those
stories came out in the #MeToo era. One of the things I thought that was so
profound about those stories was hearing women’s accounts of if you’re someone who’s
an intern in an entertainment company and a man harasses you or assaults you in
certain ways, just the matrix of decisions that that person has to make about
their livelihood, about what they’re going to do. That’s structural. Right?
That has to do with economic conditions, right? That has to do with job
security.

That tells us that if people are insecure and are working
and don’t have guaranteed contracts, they’re going to be vulnerable to that,
because they’re going to put up with more, just because they don’t want to get
fired or they don’t want to deal with it, right? That’s structural. That’s not
just about what’s in a man’s head, although there’s horrible things in men’s
heads that have to be erased, right? It’s not to let men off the hook. So it’s
not about letting individuals off the hook. Those stories that came out of #MeToo,
I think, have shown people some of the things that are wrong with the
structure. And I think that’s the power of what storytelling can do–that’s
what we try to do with both “Uncivil” and “Seeing White” in different ways.
With “Seeing White” we’re really trying to shift the conversation about race to
something that is structural and systematic and historical, rather than just
thinking of racism as a disease.

I mean, you still to this day will hear people use that
kind of metaphor. They’re like, “People have the disease of racism.”
“Racism is a disease.” Racism is not like a disease, I don’t think.
It’s not like a thing…when you think of it that way, some people got it, most
of us don’t. Let’s fix the people who got it and we’re all good–nah that’s
just not how it goes.

Florence
Madenga: Yeah,
and not only is it a disease but sort of how far back can you forgive racist
acts. It’s like, “Yeah, back then I was sick, but now I’m okay and I can
be governor.” That idea definitely ispervasive in a lot of ways.

Chenjerai
Kumanyika: Right.
Absolutely. And, I mean, I’m just curious. So how are you all thinking about
this thing in the Center for Media Risk? These issues.

Florence
Madenga: Well,
the stuff I’m doing for the center is very … well, for me it’s very
traumatizing to be honest.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: I understand, yeah.

Florence Madenga: And just really disturbing. Last semester I did a long form piece just on the beat of reporting white supremacy. First I started off just talking to journalists– who’s actually reporting this? What’s the history of reporting? All the way from back to when people were doing stories on the KKK to now. What are sort of like the norms? And then I got to a point where I went to WURD, a radio station in Philly. I was asking these questions and somebody actually stopped me and was like, “Well, you’re not really thinking about the audience as well. We are a black radio station and our audiences don’t want to hear someone from the alt-right coming in and having an interview with somebody and rehashing why they think in the ways they think. We’re reporting on white supremacy, but we’re approaching it very differently. We’re not infiltrating, we’re not doing the things the New York Times is doing. We’re looking at this differently.” And I started thinking, okay, who is deemed to be working on this beat? How do we conceptualize reporters working on this issue and what does that say about the large systematic issues as well. So that’s where the piece then went.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: Oh wow. That’s brilliant.

Florence Madenga: So that’s what I worked on. I worked on this for a couple
months actually.

Chenjerai
Kumanyika: Oh
wow. No, I’d love to read this. It’s such a great point, right? Local radio
like W-U-R-D, which is dealing with these systems in different ways and these
oppressive structures, but isn’t doing like a VICE, “We’re going to go in
to infiltrate the Klan.” But that gets the props and the awards actually. I
remember meeting the woman who did that at the Peabody Awards, you know? They
get the awards, but the local reporting, which is still covering those kinds of
things, may not get those kinds of awards. And that’s a great point, yeah.

Florence Madenga: Absolutely.

Chenjerai
Kumanyika: One issue that a lot of journalists of color
are dealing with is being in institutions that are predominantly white. And I
want to be clear. I mean, the white journalists that I’ve had a chance to work
with at NPR and even Gimlet and many other places are really committed to
trying to do better, essentially. I would say at Gimlet, there was a real
understanding. We made “Uncivil.” I was co-executive producer and they were
really receptive to some of the things that we wanted to do. I was like, listen,
I’m not going to be the only black person in the room who has to be a proxy for…something
false called “the black audience,” as though there’s just one perspective
amongst the 42 million black people in the United States. “I’m not going to
take that pressure” I said. Some of that was we hired diversely and also
we created a consultant-like group of people who are journalists and people who
are scholars who we could send certain aspects of our episodes on and get a
take on it. That reduced some of the stress on me, because I could at least
feel… the dynamic changes when you have those voices present.

That’s not the deep structural solution that we ultimately
need. And I don’t know that the deep structural solution we need is going to
come out of a for-profit media organization, period.

Florence
Madenga: Yeah.
It’s good you brought that up, because you’ve been an advocate of diversity
voice-wise as storytellers, sort of in the newsroom, particularly in radio and
even podcasts. What do you think it would take for the equity and diversity of
voices—what do you think it would take to get there.

Chenjerai
Kumanyika: I think you need the right mix of media
institutions. Right now almost all our primary news institutions, at least all
the cable news and big media networks, are all totally for-profit entertainment
entities. That’s
a change that we’ve seen happen and I’ve seen happen in my lifetime. A similar
thing is kind of starting to happen even in podcasting. So all those things, I
think, are not great for diversity in terms of voices. But what I want to get
at is I think we should think critically about some of the language about
voices. I think that, essentially, there’s a long history of the influence of
advertising, monopoly and capital and corporate processes in media in general. If
you see the influence of advertising on media, you start to see is it really does
start to affect the content. It starts to affect the autonomy– and there’s lot
of research on this. There’s a certain oppressive influence that economic
forces have on media.

Now there’s a way where some media are very savvy to just
say, “Well, our solution to that is just to diversify that oppressive
influence.” We have to think about diversity in terms of ownership, but
also we have to think about diversity in terms of analysis, right? Like are we
getting the voice of radical traditions and analyses in? It’s been interesting
to watch mainstream news organizations react to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. What they
have been successful with thus far, and they’re just getting started, goes
against the sort of centrist mainstream wisdom that you saw coming out of the
news often from even hosts of color.

So it’s totally possible for a woman host to be arguing something that’s in favor of patriarchy, for a host of color to be arguing something that’s still in support of a colonial kind of mentality, with reference to Puerto Rico. So that’s a problem I’m currently struggling with– how do I articulate the need for diverse voices without restricting it to just voices? Thegoal is not to diversify a colonial hierarchy.

There’s a lot of violence that’s been done using the language of objectivity in the past and it leads in some cases to that “both sides-ism” where you just are covering sides of an issue and perspectives that are absurd, have no real research behind them. But I think in what is being called the Trump era and I’m very clear to say, “What’s being called the Trump era,” because most of the things that are problematic about Trump did not start with Trump, right? In this time I’ve really come to value objectivity in the sense of saying, “There’s such a thing as facts.”

We can figure out, when we say that there’s
disproportionate police killing of certain groups of people, that’s a fact.
That’s not like made up. So I think our goal is to have better facts. It’s not
about saying that there’s not an objective reality. People have different lived
experiences But there’s a truth and I think in this area it’s really important
to hold onto it, because we are in a moment right now with Trump where people
will just choose their own facts and choose their own reality almost. And I
think that that’s not what we want.

Florence Madenga: Yeah, absolutely not.

So one of the things that “Uncivil” does really well is to
methodically dispel myths. One episode that really struck me was, I think it
was called The Portrait-

Chenjerai Kumanyika: The Portrait, yeah

Florence
Madenga: Yes.
When a caller, so said he had changed his mind about a story he’d grown up
believing about black Confederate soldiers. And I remember at the beginning
that there was a comment about how rare it is for someone to actually change
their mind on an issue. Right now that got me to thinking about the issue of
fake news and information bubbles and social media is a really difficult one to
maneuver in that way.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: Right.

Florence
Madenga: How
do you think about … how do you change someone’s mind about that when we
can’t even agree right now–well some people can’t even agree right now–on
facts about things that are happening right now. How do you think about
changing someone’s mind from things that are so ingrained in national memory? Myths
about the South and the Civil War that people still believe that are just not
factual.

Chenjerai
Kumanyika: Right. One thing I think that doesn’t work is
to walk up to someone who has deeply held assumptions that are totally
different from yours and has held those things for years and then just try to
have a dialogue like you’re going to do the work then. I mean, really this
stuff requires some degree of study. It requires reading. It requires a desire
on the part of the person who’s going to be learning to want to learn. And sort
of good faith sensibility.

So we understood
when we made “Uncivil” and when I made “Seeing White” that this is in a way for
an audience who does want to know, who’s interested, but maybe who believes
some things that aren’t true. We tried to find the stories that would do the
work and we spent a lot of time thinking about the structure that would really
tell a story and when you get the story and you get someone’s experience in
that way it’s very persuasive.

And it’s not just that it’s bad and ignorant. It’s also
ideological–it serves certain purpose. If we’re going to get to justice and
liberation for women, for people of color, for people with disabilities, for
poor people, we need a radically transformed system, in my analysis. What I
think the American mythology does is cause us to feel like to get liberation we
got to go back to something that was great. We got to go back to the Founding
Fathers.

So I think it’s about undoing that and a lot of it is just
facts. Even the Constitution, right? One of the things I’ve been spending more
time with constitutional scholars in terms of reading them. And seeing the way
in which some of the problems we have go right into the Constitution, like an
institution like the Senate, right? What the Founding Fathers literally wrote.
They created a Senate where you can have a state like Wyoming with a tiny
population have equal voting power in the Senate to California.

And those larger states are all places where people of
color are, right? And women. So you have a Senate which by its nature, the way
it’s designed and written into the Constitution, is discriminatory in a way. Cause
it has veto power over other decisions. So I think it’s really about knowing
that it’s okay for us to let go of what once existed and to essentially say
that to get justice we have to become something we’ve never been and that’s
okay. We can still find our identity and purpose. We can still find solidarity,
we can even find joy and hope that way. We don’t have to cling to this mythology.

Florence
Madenga: I’m
assuming a lot of your students interact with the work you’re doing outside of
class, like educating the public. I’m wondering what kind of conversations
these interactions bring up? Because you are working in an institution where a
lot of the ideas you’re talking about are sort of feared—the sense of overhaul of
the system we have right now. So I’m wondering, do you talk about these things
in class or is it sort of separate? And what are some of the things that are
coming up that you think are interesting?

Chenjerai
Kumanyika: It’s like I have two sets of students. I have
the students who actually physically take my classes at the universities that I
work for and then I have students are sort of like the millions of people who
listen to “Seeing White” and “Uncivil.”

In a way there’s more conversation about the specific
podcasts among them. I often use “Uncivil” and “Seeing White” in the classroom,
and other podcasts, to try to give students examples. Sometimes it’s to address
an issue– we talk about what does whiteness mean, why whiteness is not skin
color, to talk about what the lost cause narrative is and what it has to do
with race. But mostly what I’m trying to do is show students in my classrooms
that these are things you could do, like here’s a little example of how we use
storytelling, use technology, and then you all have much more ability to do
this. Let’s create some assignments and some cool things where you can engage.

But as far as the questions about the actual content, more
of those come from e-mails. You talked about people not changing their mind
very often, but I get to see the people who do change the mind, people who are
thinking differently, and I get an e-mail and they’ll say, “Oh, I listened
to this and it really changed how I thought about this. Ask me about a
particular detail, historical detail. It really, I think, gives you a sort of
hopeful vision of humanity.

Probably also because podcasts are very self-selected. We
have trolls and stuff like that, but mostly somebody who wants to hate on you
is not going to listen to like six hours of your podcast just so they can hate.
They’re just going to tweet. They’re not going to listen to six hours first.
“Let me make sure I’m tweeting accurately!” No, they don’t care about
that, you know?

Florence
Madenga: So,
on that note, we talked a little bit about having diversity in the newsroom but
also I do have this concern around the burden of educating the nation about
white supremacy or the history of white privilege that often falls on people of
color. Even like the responsibility of systematic change. I’m thinking
specifically about a passage I read in Safiya Noble’s book, Algorithms of
Oppression where she talks about this onus of change in digital spaces where
sort of algorithms that are biased and changing that is placed on black people,
so things like, “Oh, they should play a meaningful role in the production
of this or that” or “They should learn how to code.” And so, the
responsibility then is, “You fix this” and “You be there.”
And that alone supposedly should shift the tide of hiring in Silicon Valley and
the things that are going on there that are problematic.

So yeah, I’m wondering how you’re thinking about this
tension here and just how to express it?

Chenjerai Kumanyika: I would divide your
question into two different things.

One is just the educational burden that you wind up living
with as a person of color or a woman or someone who’s maybe oppressed in some
way. I think for me, once again, we need certain conditions. So I’ve become
aware of that and I try to really lovingly let people know when it’s not time
for me to do that. I have reporters who would just call me like, “Will you
educate me on this issue?” And I’m just like, “Yo, you know. I want
to help, but I’m not somebody who’s actually getting paid.” People who are
making movies, films, just like free consultancy on race.

So there’s that aspect and then there’s the issue of
ultimately changing these systems, right? I think that unfortunately the burden
does wind up falling on oppressed people to change systems. Not because it
should, but just because those who are living through it are the ones who
typically and historically have come together to resist that oppression. I
think that when we do it collectively and when we do it in an organized way we
can distribute that work, and we can actually make it a site of community
building and something that recharges us as a kind of collective self-care. I think
that’s why ultimately we want to try to find ways to institutionalize and
collectivize those moments.

For me, especially in this body of a black male, I’ve
definitely learned that you have to just … once my tone goes up and people
feel any level of anger … I can be talking about something that legitimately
you should be angry about, like a 12-year-old child being killed by the police
or whatever. Or poverty or whatever. But if I seem the least bit angry it’s
like people stop listening, they shut down.

So I’ve learned to try to moderate and really kind of calm
myself and appear measured. I spend a lot of time about being angry about
having to do that, but I think that what just got beyond the anger is I just
want to be an effective communicator.

Florence
Madenga: Can
you expand a little bit on this. Like what are some lessons and techniques for
storytellers or educators or media practitioners, I guess, like me, who want to
learn how to do the work you’re doing? I’m thinking even specifically about
things like dispelling national myths at a time where things like just
fact-checking doesn’t seem to be enough.

Chenjerai
Kumanyika: One technique I saw Michelle Alexander employ,
that has always stuck with me, is when she began giving her first talk about The New Jim Crow, and I believe the book
is structured this way too, she started out by saying, “Here’s how I was
thinking about this issue six years ago. People who commit crimes, maybe
they’re not totally treated fairly, but if you don’t commit a crime you don’t
have that problem.” She didn’t really see crime as a social justice issue
and mass incarceration.

So when she stated all those assumptions like that, it was
clear she was echoing what a lot of people in the room believed at that moment.
But that’s where she started the speech, and then she slowly walked to where
she is now at the end of having written The
New Jim Crow. Because she just sort of walked with people I think it was
really, really persuasive. That means you have to recognize and understand what
people’s assumptions are. And that means that there even has to be a certain kindness
and patience with that.

Florence
Madenga: What
are some things that you’re working on now that address the challenges we’ve
been talking about.

Chenjerai
Kumanyika: My main project right now is a book I’m
writing on stories about black philanthropy. And it’s a critical book. I want
to find a way to worry about black philanthropy without hating on the people
who are doing these efforts.

I think it’s great that people like Jay-Z or Beyoncé or
Rihanna or somebody are “giving back.” But I want to think critically about
what giving back really means, especially if you’re making money by giving
back, and also I want to think about the narrative of social mobility. Because
we’re at a time when I think a lot of people are understanding that it takes
social protest and struggle to change systems, right? You go back to the roots
of a particular strand of philanthropy, which is Carnegie and Rockefeller, they
explicitly were giving back to prevent people from critiquing their corporate
practices. So the question is if you put a black face on that does that change
it? Does that intensify the ability to do that? It’s probably going to be a
little controversial. ‘Cause we like those stories, right? We like to hear oh,
Jay-Z built a charter school. But…

Florence
Madenga:
Yeah. Really looking forward to what you do with that. And the Twitter rage
that will ensue.

Chenjerai
Kumanyika: Yeah, yeah… I’ll probably have to go off
Twitter soon ’cause … But I want to have the conversation though so, you
know? I’m receptive too..

Florence
Madenga: Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah.

Aaron Shapiro: Thanks for listening. Today’s episode was produced by Florence Madenga and edited by me, Aaron Shapiro. We’d like to thank Emily Plowman, Joanna Birkner and Waldo Aguirre. Barbie Zelizer directs the Center for Media at Risk. Our next episode will be the first in a multi-part series on the media cultures of the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, be sure to check it out. To find out more, visit our website www.ASCmediarisk.org.

MUSIC

“All the Right Things” by Son Lux (intro)“Better Give U Up” by FKJ “Slow Roll” by Tommy Guerrero “Tiny Tortures” by Flying Lotus “A Fang Kheng Kan — Acoustic” by Khruang Bin “Let Go” by Son Lux “Blue Zipper” by Made of Oak“Two Fish and an Elephant” by Khruangbin (outtro)

FEEDBACK

We’d love to hear from you, especially if you have stories about this podcast, our Center and anything in between. Feel free to write a note or record a voice memo on your smartphone and email it to media.risk@asc.upenn.edu; you can also find us on Twitter and Facebook at @ASCMediaRisk. Though we’re a small operation, we’re always open to pitches and new stories.

CREDITS

Chenjerai Kumanyika is a researcher, journalist, an artist who works as an assistant professor in Rutgers University’s Department of Journalism and Media Studies. His research and teaching focus on the intersections of social justice and emerging media in the cultural and creative industries. He has written about these issues in journals such as Popular Music & Society, Popular Communication, The Routledge Companion to Advertising and Promotional Culture and Technology, Pedagogy and Education. Currently, Kumanyika is the Co-Executive Producer and Co-Host of Gimlet Media’s new podcast on the Civil War. He has also been a contributor to Transom, NPR Codeswitch, All Things Considered, Invisibilia, VICE, and he is a news analyst for Rising Up Radio with Sonali Kolhatkar. Find him on Twitter @catchatweetdown

Florence Madenga is a doctoral student at the Annenberg School for Communication. She studies journalistic practice broadly and comparatively construed, and how certain existing journalistic models and paradigms fall short in different cultural contexts, especially in countries in sub-Saharan Africa. She is particularly interested in the roles journalists play in or beside state-sponsored media, how they challenge or are affected by censorship laws and “nation-building” tools employed by governments, and journalists in diasporic communities and social media. She also explores the evolution and boundaries of media and identity as it pertains to expanding globalization as well as new and old conceptualizations of nationalism. Prior to joining Annenberg, Madenga worked as a freelance writer both from the United States and internationally, mostly writing about African immigrants in the United States and elsewhere. Her work has appeared on BuzzFeed, in Chimurenga, Narratively, and other publications. Find her on Twitter @florencemadenga

This episode was produced by Florence Madenga and edited by Aaron Shapiro.

Center for Media at Risk

media.risk@asc.upenn.edu

This article was published by the editors and producers at the Center for Media at Risk.